Augusta Ada Lovelace to Faraday   10 November 1844

Ashley Combe | Porlock | Somerset | Sunday 10th Novr Dear Mr Faraday,

I am exceedingly tickled with your comparison of yourself to a tortoise ¹. It has excited all my fun (& I assure you I have no little of that in me).

I am also struck with the forcible truth of your designation of my character of mind:

"elasticity of intellect"².

It is indeed the very truth, most happily put into language.

You have excited in my mind a ridiculous, but not ungraceful, allegorical picture, viz

that of a quiet demure plodding tortoise, with a beautiful fairy gambolling round it in a thousand radiant & varying hues; the tortoise crying out, "Fairy, fairy, I am not like you. I cannot at pleasure assume a thousand aerial shapes & expand myself over the face of the universe. Fairy, fairy, have mercy on me, & remember I am but a tortoise".

What says the kind gentle fairy in reply? Somewhat as follows:

"Good tortoise, then I will be to you of plain & sober hue. I can assume what form I like. I will be the beautiful phantom, glowing in colour & eloquence, when so you order me. But I will now be a little quiet brown bird at your side, & gently let you teach me how to know & aid you. But my wand is yours at pleasure, & into your hands I deliver it for your use".

So speaks the ladye-fairy. Well! forgive my fun & metaphor. I am as basinfull of sportive mirth as of science, you know.

One friend of mine always calls me "The fairy". This is what suggested to me a comparison so very complimentary to myself, that I ought scarcely to have originated it, & did not.

My Lord, my husband³, always calls me The Bird. So strong is the feeling in his mind of the similarity, that I really think he almost sees me under the form of that lovely species of God's creatures.

An eminent physician said I was as like an Arab mare as could be, both in physical constitution & in disposition.

Oh dear! I have no business to entertain you with all this egotism. But really, your note has set the vein a-going; the allegorical species of my mind; & I can hardly stop.

Another friend always calls me "the sprite". I don't know how it is, but nobody calls me or thinks me a simple mortal!

But is not a mathematical fairy a very curious compound? So it is however; & there is the secret. I have in me both north & south polarities; & dame Nature has played a freak, & for once united in a beautiful harmony in one individual, faculties that usually do not co-exist.

The deepest Analysis, with brilliant Imagination for ever playing on the surface of those grave & fathomless depths. Analysis is for ever calling the gambols of my Imagination to order & confining them to a subjection to the true & the logical.

To try & be quite grave & matter of fact again:

You are right. We must meet, & talk. So, will the Tortoise be good enough to appoint an evening for coming to this mischievous sprite of a thousand forms; (for venturing within her magic circle)? Thursday 28th, at 6 o'clock.

Will that do?

And I will give you some human earthly tea or coffee, or any other mortal food you may choose; & not insist on your having nothing but the dew & ambrosia I am obliged to feed my fairy nature on.

I hope this letter won't make you very angry.

I mean it to make you laugh.

At any rate you must, I am sure, perceive that you have a most good-natured creature to deal with in

Yours most sincerely | A.A.L.

P.S. It has struck me that as I have not specified St James' Sqre, for our meeting on the 28th, you may perhaps suppose that I have a habit of magically transporting myself over space, & that I expect you & others to do the same, & that you are to be here at six o'clock on the 28th. So I just add a P.S to say I do not demand quite so much; & that we are to meet in St James' Sqre; as becomes other mortals, & tortoises especially.

Endorsed by Faraday: 1844